What's Wrong With This Picture?
from the change-of-focus dept
As you may have heard, there's been an election in Rome recently. These kind of events tend to bring out the crowds, and NBC had the clever idea of finding a couple of pictures showing roughly the same view, but eight years apart. They look very similar, except for one rather striking detail: in the first, from 2005, there are a few mobile phones visible; in the second, taken recently, tiny screens are visible everywhere in the crowd -- it seems as if practically everyone is using their phone to take a picture.
But the same article also notes that other pictures taken at the time of the election of Pope Benedict XVI a few weeks after the death of his predecessor show a similar scarcity of people holding up their phones to take pictures. And a moment's reflection will confirm that nowadays there is an almost reflexive urge to use our smartphones with their high-quality cameras to capture anything of note that is going on around us, in a way that wasn't the case when cameras were separate things (to say nothing of when some kind of physical film had to be loaded, emptied and developed in order to use them.) The huge numbers of pictures on Facebook alone -- 220 billion as of October last year, rising by 300 million each day -- also bears witness to that.
This raises many interesting questions, for example to do with how people nowadays relate to their memories, and what the existence of so many photos means for privacy and surveillance. But here I want to consider one other aspect.
Judging by the Facebook numbers quoted above, there are now probably trillions of digital photos in existence, with billions more being created each day. It goes without saying that this wealth of fixed (and moving) images is unprecedented in the history of mankind. That also means the things that could be done with those images are also unprecedented, because new scales bring new possibilities. For example, by combining millions of pictures taken by thousands of people of the same location at different moments it would be possible to create interesting four-dimensional digital artifacts -- navigable 3D worlds that change with time.
Except, of course, that you can't, thanks to the way that copyright is automatically attached to creations once they are fixed -- for example, by storing a digital photo. To use all those images for this kind of reconstruction would require every single one of them to be licensed under a suitable Creative Commons license that allowed them to be re-used. Even the simplest of them -- CC-BY -- would be hard to comply with, since attribution would need to be available for every photo that made even the smallest contribution to the different composite images for each moment of time. Ideally, billions of images would be placed in the public domain, allowing any kind of use, but that's surprisingly hard to achieve, because of the prevailing presumption that copyright should apply to everything, for as long as possible. Certainly, it's not something we can reasonably hope huge numbers of people might do routinely.
This inability to tap into the incredible collective wealth of a trillion digital images stored around the world imbues that recent picture of thousands of people holding up their mobile phones in Rome with a certain melancholy. The blurred screens receding into the distance become a symbol of all that we cannot see thanks to copyright laws whose original focus on protecting small numbers of hard-to-produce works from copying is no longer appropriate.
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Filed Under: memories, photographs, pictures, pope
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Fast forward a few years
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Eventually everyone will recognize the benefit
At some point everyone might willingly contribute their pictures to be stitched together and not care about the tiny or non existent value of copyright in their individual photos. The larger benefit of being able to stitch all those pictures together is huge and benefits everyone.
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Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
BUT TO BLAME COPYRIGHT for gadgetry that doesn't yet exist! Whew! That's ingenuity! You evidence NO mania at all.
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Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
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Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
Blinks...doesn't exist yet? Then...what the fuck am I holding in my hand and talking into?"
I don't use vulgarisms, so won't say! But if you THINK on what you wrote there, you'll see it's a straight line that lesser minds couldn't resist.
Anyway. Sheesh.
Here's the clean answer, from "would be possible to create interesting four-dimensional digital artifacts -- navigable 3D worlds that change with time." -- The gadget that I allude to is the one Minion Moody suggests that will take all those images and amalgamate them, silly.
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Re: Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
I believe that technologically such a task is feasible now (especially with all the metadata some camera phones keep *cough iphones cough*). The problem is getting access to the dataset (thousands of pictures taken by thousands of people) and getting the permission to use it (thousands of licenses from thousands of people).
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/
https: //code.google.com/p/pixelstruct/
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Re: Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
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Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
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Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
You see, the normal person with any level of reading comprehension would see that Glynn started talking about how different we as a people are now versus just a few years ago, due to technology, then segued to lamenting the fact that, due to copyright, we are losing out on the possibilities of some ginormous crowd-funded projects using datasets so large that a few years ago they would have been incomprehensible.
Mr. Blue must have seen the picture, skimmed over a bunch of funny looking squiggles until the word "copyright" came into focus, then the gremlin living in his brain told him that the only explanation for the word "copyright" to be in proximity to the picture is that Glynn was blaming the dearth of gadgets in the "before" picture on copyright. It's basically your garden variety straw man argument, but taken all the damn way to crazy-town.
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I get the feeling he's not a native English speaker. Sometimes you can almost HEAR that broken-English accent...
Or brain damage, that could be it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
Adherence to copyright maximalism does tend to cause brain damage over time.
The ability to do math is the first thing to go, followed shortly thereafter by a breakdown in the brain's ability to understand and process logic, as well as a decline in reading comprehension. From there one tends to see a spiral into irrationality and a degradation of speech that ultimately ends with the patient foaming rabidly at the mouth and displays of indescriminate aggression against anything that enters his or her field of vision.
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Re: Congratulations! FURTHEST stretch yet against copyright!
But, comprehension...? Fuck that.
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The Internet was first
Social media does move quickly with the news but naturally you can't always trust the source when PhotoShop use is rampant.
Yes this is just the progress of technology and it is hardly like we are all going to throw our phones away. Just imagine what we will be using as the next Pope is elected. Google glass?
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2170
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What's wrong with this picture? I know the answer.
That big screen is SO distracting when you're watching a show/play/concert, and someone has a big ol' 10" screen up in front of your face.
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picture matching
basically what that means is that the other picture had people holding up phones, cameras and other things.
so they're doctoring the story by purposefully using pictures that don't depict the truth of the matter.
otherwise, why not use the older photo from the time of the last popes speech, selection, etc?
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Re: picture matching
Why do some of you feel the need to be so blatantly and willfully ignorant?
person: "We can BUILD IT."
lawyer: "Umm, no, sorry, no you can't. You need permission."
person: "From whom?"
lawyer: "Everyone, as well as the permission of those that represent everyone."
person: "God?"
lawyer: "No, I'm afraid that God has been forced to sign a non-compete agreement, in absentia mind you but signed nonetheless."
person: "How do I innovate."
lawyer: "Do you see that large box over there? If you get into that and shut the lid then I'm sure something will come to you."
The box will disintegrate in the rain. Bring the rain.
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Re: picture matching
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Re: picture matching
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No cats?
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You touch on another issue that I wonder about--the effect of all this documentation on memory. I have very few memories of my childhood. I also have very few pictures (and those mostly contextless class photos), and no film whatsoever. My daughter, on the other hand, has a multitude of photos and vides documenting most of the events of her life.
How will all that evidence effect her memories of her childhood?
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Re:
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Handy tools
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Permissive licensing of photos, contractual restrictions and official photography regulations
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Prohibition and Piracy
When looking at the Prohibition of alcohol in the US vs content piracy there is one very striking difference. In both instances, the public showed a complete disregard for the law on a massive scale. The difference is that Congress acted rather swiftly to remedy the issue by repealing a very bad law.
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Real?
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Other difference
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